Alex Meinhof is a second-year student majoring in philosophy at UC Santa Barbara. He is involved in the music scene on campus and works at UCSB’s radio station, KCSB-FM, which serves as both a means of entertainment of place of community for students. Meinhof recently spoke to HFA about his experience in this interview.
“It comes from the premise that we need a comparative frame for understanding cities in much of the world,” said professor Chattopadhyay in UCSB’s History of Art and Architecture department. In a recent talk, Chattopadhyay addressed the challenges of documenting temporary structures specifically in Kolkata, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, where structures are built for their annual Hindu religious festival called Durgapuja.
The job of an environmental journalists is to take the scientific language of research studies and clarify it in a concise manner for the general public. It is their responsibility to inform the public on the current state of the environment.
In a recent interview, Kayla Curtis-Evans shared what drew her to pursue this field and what she plans to achieve in the future.
Inspired by fellow student and artist Erika Kodama and her work in Little Tokyo at its Changing Tides exhibit, Quan Nguyen writes to express the impact that art, joining the Nikkei Student Union, and sharing the Asian American experience have had on his life.
Film and Media Studies major Katelyn Zamudio recently produced Playdolls, a documentary that looks at the issue of human trafficking from different perspectives. In a recent interview, Zamudio discusses her experience bringing this issue to light in an empathetic way.
In a recent interview, Raymok Ketema, a first-generation African American college student pursuing her PhD in History at UCSB, discussed her project for the Center for Black Studies Research on minorities in engineering and why she perseveres in her work for women, the Black community, and other people of color.
Third-year student Zeina Safadi, majoring in political science with minor in professional writing, is accustomed to public speaking. As she works towards graduation and a future career in law, she balances her academic life and jobs: undergraduate peer advisor, Mock Trial president, legal assistant at the law offices of Robert B. Locke, and attorney general at UC Santa Barbara. With an impressive resume and a facility for public speaking, Safadi spoke in a recent interview about the ways public speaking has played an important role in her life.
It’s a “dystopian fiction tragi-comedy set in 2050” that explores “our desire of a technological utopia that is supported by human greed and inevitable climate change,” said Maiza Hixon, a graduating Master of Fine Arts student.
Hixon recently held a reading of her first written play Chimera at the Art, Design and Architecture Museum in conjunction with the opening of the 2019 MFA thesis exhibition Temporary Clash.
“Intimate labor and the workers who performed it have always been central to the history of capitalism,” University of Wisconsin historian April Haynes said in a recent talk at UC Santa Barbara. She argues that intimate labor and sex have always played an important part in the United States’ economy.
Haynes, a UCSB alumna, shared her research on intimate labor from the 1790s to the 1860s during her talk for the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy.
Pilipino Cultural Night (PCN) is the ambitious year-long project organized by students in Kapatirang Pilipino (KP), an organization which fosters a close-knit network of Filipinx-American students at UCSB to promote social, cultural, political, and academic ties within the community. The Filipinx student group just celebrated its 40th anniversary on the UCSB campus and serves as the powerhouse behind nearly three decades of Pilipino Cultural Nights.
“I learn about different indigenous cultures, and the dances that originate there and what inspired those performances,” a student said. “I learn about the hardships of the Filipinx people and become aware of matters in the past and present.”
In celebration of the 2019 Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Temporary Clash, The Art, Design, & Architecture Museum held a Friday evening reception in conjunction with the Art Department. Students, faculty, and community members admired the works of the eight featured artists—Maiza Hixson, Madeleine Eve Ignon, Adam Jahnke, Kayla Mattes, Elisa Ortega Montilla, Andrew Morrison, Echo Theohar, and Christopher Anthony Velasco. Temporary Clash highlights the M.F.A. students’ strikingly diverse styles, mediums, and messages, while collectively portraying the human experience.
“Stanford. Harvard. Yale. Berkeley.
These were just a few of the universities that my classmates from the second-ranked school on the list of Best College Preparatory Public High Schools in California went to. Going to community college was seen as failure in the Bay Area, a stigma that I could feel from the gaze of everyone who asked me where I was going.”
In a candid and inspiring piece, Esther Ho reflects on attitudes toward community college, and how she pushed past them to succeed academically and financially, ultimately landing at UC Santa Barbara.
“Great ancestors, you are breath, you are bridge, you carry us over tumultuous time,” recited New Orleans poet Sunni Patterson to a Tuesday evening spoken word event at UC Santa Barbara’s MultiCultural Center. As she does below, she conveys the beauty and pain of being human into words.
“We often say that living in New Orleans is an act of resistance,” she said. She described the area as both a home and a burial ground, where its residents avoid talking about slavery’s legacy on the city’s culture. When people start digging to build a pool, she said, they often find bones in the ground.
As a transfer student spending his first year at UC Santa Barbara Omar Reyes is still figuring what he wants to do during his time at college. Through a project in the English Department’s Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellow Program, Reyes has learned to balance his individual work with finding community and seeking knowledge from his colleagues.
“I consider that evening in May 2018 and the months of work leading up to it to be some of the most memorable and impactful experiences of my life,” says Giovanna Vicini, a graduating Film & Media Studies and Communication double major at UCSB, of hosting the 27th Annual Reel Loud Film & Arts Festival onstage at Campbell Hall. “My teammates and I led the organization toward record-breaking growth, achieving Reel Loud’s most competitive year to date.”
While Olivia Saunders isn’t majoring in Linguistics, her major in Communication has provoked many questions from others about whether she wants to pursue speech therapy. That led her on a search to learn more about Linguistics, the major that is most closely linked to speech therapy. She found that its career options and students’ pursuits go much further, as she explains in this article.
“Jesus’s words and deeds made him one of the most impactful historical figures in the world,” writes student Yasmeen Faris, in a personal reflection on the intersection between her secular studies and her own faith.
In this piece, Faris talks about how a course in the Religious Studies department at UCSB changed her outlook on Jesus Christ, expanding her understanding of his impact on her personal life and religion and the effect that he had on the history of the world.
Visiting poet Tyree Daye says his process for exposing reality in a poem is more fantastical and imaginative than literal. “Imagination. Magic all day long,” Daye told a recent gathering of UC Santa Barbara students interested in poetry, or aspiring to be poets themselves. Daye recited selections of his work at the 2019 annual event to honor the Diana and Simon Raab Writer in Residence.
Created in 2017 by theater professor Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, New Works Lab is a workshop production program that gives students the unique opportunity to see their works come to life. It brings together student directors, playwrights, designers, stage managers, publicists and actors to put on original plays written by UCSB students. In the fall, students submit their scripts, after which a committee of students and faculty choose their top five or six scripts to which to give developmental productions. Directors, stage managers, designers and actors are then chosen in the winter and the shows are put into production in the spring. Every two weeks, each show performs their play in front the New Works Lab class and receives feedback from other students and faculty mentors.
In a recent interview, Cowhig spoke more about the class and its growth since its conception.
“My work is about vulnerability, desire, and fear,” Los Angeles ceramicist Lauren Gallaspy said in an installment of the Spring 2019 Arts Colloquium. “I’m interested in the recolonization of the territory of our minds and our bodies.”
Gallaspy’s work explores the transitional state that separates life from death, and creatures from objects. She seeks to convey wholeness and brokenness in her ceramic pieces, breaking the rules of ceramics and completing the process in unorthodox ways.
